Don’t you just love them. You write your UI, you think you design you code you fix you bug fix again when testers break everything in sight you perform usability trials on people and they don’t even find that feature you worked on for 2 weeks. Well ok it’s not quite that bad and this … Read more
The editor recently returned exhausted from TechEd. He tells everyone who will listen that he has worn himself out trying to persuade the great and the good of the SQL Server world to write articles for Simple-Talk. I can believe it, though I can’t recall the SQL Server expert and writer called Samuel Adams that … Read more
In between the bouts of champagne for new product launches, eating the yoghurts and drinking the smoothies from the ‘feel good fridge’. In between the free Thursday lunches and punting on the Cam we manage to get a surprising amount of work done here at Red Gate. In fact I’ve been radio silent for the … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. This is the last day of TechEd, and people are already leaving to fly home, and things are winding down. Yesterday, when the vendor section ended at 3:00 PM, within a few seconds of making the closing announcement, convention center staff were literally beginning to rip off the carpeting on the floor, … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. TechEd was bustling today. A lot of vendors were giving away big prizes, and swag trolls were getting the last goodies they could before TechEd ends tomorrow. Most of the vendors have already run out of give-aways. I think enough tee-shirts where given away at TechEd to clothe a small third world … Read more
[imageattachment] Maxx Dopp here. TechEd has continued to pick up today. It seems odd to me that Monday and Wednesday were busy days, while Tuesday was so slow. Maybe this is normal, but since this is my first TechEd, it is new to me. As I write this, there is a major thunderstorm and heavy … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. This morning, activity at TechEd has picked up. We have been getting lots of questions about SQL Server. Some of the questions have included: How do permissions on linked servers work? How do I use SQL Server encryption? How do I convert DTS packages to SSIS packages. How do you find object … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. Lunch has just been served, but no live band today. As I mentioned earlier, activity is much quieter today at TechEd. At least today, I got to eat lunch. On Monday, I was a little late, and virtually all the food was gone when I got there. [imageattachment] As I was helping … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. Today is day two of TechEd. When compared to yesterday, it seems much slower paced. I don’t know if too many people partied last night, or if the initial excitement is already over. Or, maybe it is because most of the swag was given away already and there little more to collect. … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. Wow, today has been exhausting, and it is still only Monday, with four more days to go. TechEd is an overwhelming experience, with almost more than the senses can easily process. This afternoon, I roamed the vendor booths, talking with lots of people. What really amazes me is the amount of swag … Read more
Maxx Dopp here. TechEd 2007 began this morning in Orlando, Fl. The sun was shining and the weather perfect. But like most good geeks, instead of hanging around the pool or the parks, over 12,000 of us gathered in the dark caverns of the Orlando Convention Center. This is my first TechEd, can you believe … Read more
I’ve read a great deal about the origin of the word ‘Bug’ in computer software. You’d have thought the argument was settled ages ago when everyone agreed that In 1947, the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory traced an error in the Mark II computer to a moth trapped in a relay, thereby coining the … Read more
I ran into a bit of a problem the other day with Microsoft Virtual PC staring outside of my viewable desktop area. And it turns out that it wasn’t just a fluke, because it’s happened a couple of times since then. And Robby, one of the guys I work with at Cogent, had the same problem. Here’s how … Read more
The real advances in IT are seldom the ones that are heralded by great noise or media hype. So many of the technologies that have become part of our lives, such as browsers, Email and ‘texting’ came surreptitiously, almost by accident. Technologies that come with a fanfare often tend to fade away. In retrospect, what … Read more
It is a good practice to store creation scripts for the database organized in a way that there is a single SQL file for each database object. The problem starts when one wants a single script that creates all of these database objects. I’ve seen a solution in which the creation SQL files are concatenated, … Read more
This is an addition to my book, on page 255, to the end of the section on collation (before the statement that I won’t delve any deeper into collations, of course :)), I want to add the following bit of information about collations and how they affect sorting and searching. You can download the entire … Read more
SharePoint does a good job of hiding errors from users. Out of the box, unhandled errors in SharePoint result in a fairly non-descript page that says “An Error Occurred” (or something to that effect). Although a good practice for your end-users, it’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to get a piece of code working or … Read more
One thing that has annoyed me quite a lot lately is the way that cut-n-paste code from visual studio 2005 fails to look nice in emails. Your tabs dissappear you very large line gaps for every new line in your code and it sets the text to be a very strange font. Now maybe it’s … Read more
We have just released the first public beta for SQL Compare 6.0. The full version of SQL Compare 6.0 is scheduled for release towards the end of June 2007. For the forum and download information visit http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewforum.php?f=65 So what is new in SQL Compare 6.0 beta? SQL Compare 6.0 beta introduces a new data … Read more
I was peacefully pottering away at my workstation, contentedly spawning a daughter thread or something similar, when Robyn popped in. She’d been wrestling with the Grouping Workbench and trying to come up with a copper-bottomed explanation for what the GROUP BY statement does. I’d been trying to help out in my usual arrogant paternalistic way. This … Read more
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